identifying your goals
It’s the middle of summer and you find yourself trying to restrict calories and lose weight again. Sound familiar? Unfortunately we see this all the time. Maybe you had been thinking about losing weight for some time now but just can't stick to anything consistently and now it's July and you're like….. dang. So what do you do? Drop your calories way down and tell yourself you can't eat this or that? In the short term you may see some results but once summer comes and goes your old habits return and you find yourself right where you started.
I challenge you to sit down and ask yourself what exactly you want to achieve. I am not just talking about saying you want to lose weight. Do you want your favorite jeans to fit a little better? Have you noticed running feels way harder than normal? Identify specific things occurring in your life you want to really work on changing. Once you have made a clear decision on what it is, then you make a plan. This will require actual paper or a google doc, we are writing this down for real otherwise it’s not going to happen, or you didn't really want it to begin with. I like to jot down the big ticket item and work backwards from there. What does my year look like in order for this to happen, month to month, week to week, day to day. For each section I will write down specific things I can commit to that align with the big picture.
For example, let's increase your back squat from 225 to 235.
1 year: identify weaknesses in my squat, exercise consistently, work on recovery, proper nutrition.
1 month: Train a total of at least 20 days, eat more whole foods, yoga 4x
1 week: Implement exercises that are specific to weakness for the squat 1x a week (single leg work, hip strengthening etc, log my food, 1 recovery day)
Daily: Keep exercise diary, log my food, show up and do my best!
It’s easy to say you want something, be disappointed when it doesn't magically happen and blame everything around you for your shortcomings. The hard part is being honest with yourself and what you really want, realizing there will be some level of sacrifice. No matter the goal build a plan, and do your damn best to stick to. Life happens and your plan may need some tweaking along the way, but I can promise you will see results and if you don’t you will be faced with the cold hard facts of why you didn’t.
Read more over at Locomotive Nutrition.